Police tipped off MI5 about 7/7 ringleader’s military training

MI5 could have identified
Mohammed Sidique Khan, the ringleader of the 7/7 bombings, as an extremist four months before the suicide attacks, a top spy has admitted.

Mohammed Sidique Khan is alleged to have undergone military training

The senior officer, known as Witness G said the security service received police intelligence in March 2005 that Mohammed Sidique Khan had undergone military training in Afghanistan.

But he said it was for ‘good operational reasons’ why the leads were not followed up.

He said MI5 knew of many Islamist extremists but that was not the same as planning terrorist attacks.

He accepted there would then have been a ‘greater chance’ of uncovering the plot – but only if MI5 had used a ‘high degree of intrusive investigative measures’, the inquest at the Royal Courts of Justice heard.

Khan and three others detonated their devices on three Tube trains and a double-decker bus on July 7, 2005. Relatives of the 52 people killed in the atrocities want to find out what MI5 knew about the bombers before the attacks.

Secret agents failed to identify Khan from Batley, West Yorkshire, as the same man who received military instruction at a mujahideen camp in both Afghanistan in the late 1990s and Pakistan in 2001.

They also did not realise he was the same Khan watched by MI5 as part of an investigation into a fertiliser bomb plot foiled in March 2004.